articlePhysical Review EApr 18, 2007GREEN OA

Dynamics of crowd disasters: An empirical study

TU Dresden

PubMed
Indexed inarxivcrossrefpubmed

Abstract

Many observations of the dynamics of pedestrian crowds, including various self-organization phenomena, have been successfully described by simple many-particle models. For ethical reasons, however, there is a serious lack of experimental data regarding crowd panic. Therefore, we have analyzed video recordings of the crowd disaster in Mina/Makkah during the Hajj in 1426H on 12 January 2006. They reveal two subsequent, sudden transitions from laminar to stop-and-go and "turbulent" flows, which question many previous simulation models. While the transition from laminar to stop-and-go flows supports a recent model of bottleneck flows [D. Helbing, Phys. Rev. Lett. 97, 168001 (2006)], the subsequent transition to…

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1,157
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Authors

3

Topics & keywords

Keywords
  • Crowds
  • Hajj
  • Laminar flow
  • Pedestrian
  • Computer security
  • Mechanics
  • Computer science
  • Engineering
UN Sustainable Development Goals
  • Climate action
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